'Cold War Against Russia — Without Debate'

Future historians will note that in April 2014, nearly a quarter-century after the end of the Soviet Union, the White House declared a new Cold War on Russia.

And that, in a grave failure of representative democracy, there
was scarcely a public word of debate, much less opposition, from
the American political or media establishment.

The Obama administration announced its Cold War indirectly, in a
front-page New York Times story by Peter Baker on April 20.
According to the report, President Obama has resolved, because of
the Ukraine crisis, that he can “never have a constructive
relationship” with Russian President Vladimir Putin and will
instead “ignore the master of the Kremlin” and focus on
“isolating…Russia by cutting off its economic and political
ties to the outside world…effectively making it a pariah
state.” In short, Baker reports, the White House has adopted
“an updated version of the Cold War strategy of
containment.” He might have added, a very extreme version.
The report has been neither denied nor qualified by the White
House.

No modern precedent exists for the shameful complicity of the
American political-media elite at this fateful turning point.
Considerable congressional and mainstream media debate, even
protest, were voiced, for example, during the run-up to the US
wars in Vietnam and Iraq and, more recently, proposed wars
against Iran and Syria. This Cold War—its epicenter on Russia’s
borders; undertaken amid inflammatory American, Russian and
Ukrainian media misinformation; and unfolding without the
stabilizing practices that prevented disasters during the
preceding Cold War—may be even more perilous. It will almost
certainly result in a new nuclear arms race, a prospect made
worse by Obama’s provocative public assertion that “our
conventional forces are significantly superior to the
Russians’,” and possibly an actual war with Russia triggered
by Ukraine’s looming civil war. (NATO and Russian forces are
already mobilizing on the country’s western and eastern borders,
while the US-backed Kiev government is warning of a “third
world war.”)

And yet, all this has come with the virtually unanimous,
bipartisan support, or indifference, of the US political
establishment, from left to right, Democrats and Republicans,
progressives (whose domestic programs will be gravely endangered)
and conservatives. It has also been supported by mainstream media
that shape and reflect policy-making opinion, from the Times and
The Washington Post to The Wall Street Journal, from The New
Republic to The Weekly Standard, from MSNBC to Fox News, from NPR
to commercial radio news. (There are notable exceptions,
including this magazine, but none close enough to the mainstream
to be “authoritative” inside the Beltway.)

To be more specific, not one of the 535 members of Congress has
publicly expressed doubts about the White House’s new “Cold
War strategy of containment.” Nor have any of the former US
presidents or presidential candidates who once advocated
partnership with post-Soviet Russia. Before the Ukraine crisis
deepened, a handful of unofficial dissenters did appear on
mainstream television, radio and op-ed pages, but so few and
fleetingly they seemed to be heretics awaiting banishment. Their
voices have since been muted by legions of cold warriors.

Both sides in the confrontation, the West and Russia, have
legitimate grievances. Does this mean, however, that the American
establishment’s account of recent events should not be
questioned? That it was imposed on the West by Putin’s
“aggression,” and this because of his desire “to
re-create as much of the old Soviet empire as he can” or
merely to “maintain Putin’s domestic rating.” Does it
mean there is nothing credible enough to discuss in Moscow’s side
of the story? That twenty years of NATO’s eastward expansion has
caused Russia to feel cornered. That the Ukraine crisis was
instigated by the West’s attempt, last November, to smuggle the
former Soviet republic into NATO. That the West’s jettisoning in
February of its own agreement with then-President Viktor
Yanukovych brought to power in Kiev an unelected regime so
anti-Russian and so uncritically embraced by Washington that the
Kremlin felt an urgent need to annex predominantly Russian
Crimea, the home of its most cherished naval base. And, most
recently, that Kiev’s sending of military units to suppress
protests in pro-Russian eastern Ukraine is itself a violation of
the April 17 agreement to de-escalate the crisis.

Future historians will certainly find some merit in Moscow’s
arguments, and wonder why they are being widely debated in, for
example, Germany, but not in America. It may already be too late
for the democratic debate the US elite owes our nation. If so,
the costs to American democracy are already clear.

Katrina vanden Heuvel and Stephen F. Cohen

Katrina vanden Heuvel is Editor and Publisher of
The Nation. She is the author of The Change I Believe In:
Fighting for Progress in The Age of Obama (Nation Books,
2011). She is also the editor of Meltdown: How Greed and
Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can
Recover and co-editor of Taking Back America--And Taking
Down The Radical Right.

Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus at New
York University and Princeton University. His Soviet Fates
and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War
and his The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After
Stalin are now in paperback.